Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2014: Documentaries (opens January 31 exclusively at the Capitol Theatre)

Why care about the short subjects in the Academy Awards
category of Best Documentary Short Subject? A few reasons. First is my
longstanding contention that documentary film is just about the only form of
cinema left that’s of any interest and relevance.

And second, and perhaps more importantly, on Oscar nite
itself, I’ve always learned that the winners in this category are always the
loosest of loose cannons when it comes to making acceptance speeches. Even the
Documentary Feature people who have trouble living up to the mark set by Michael
“Shame on you George Bush!” Moore, now tend to behave themselves. The Short
Subject people, however, are a little less restrained at watching what comes
out of their mouths in front of a microphone.

Whether it’s treacly thank-yous to everyone they’ve ever
met, bad jokes, improvised statements on the Meaning of Life, crude
grandstanding, dogmatic Marxist-feminist-eco-rants, or sheer inarticulate fugue
state, the winners in this category generally strike me as the ones to watch
when they’re on TV. For all the wrong reasons, of course.

I guess noblesse oblige we address the movies that may
propel them up to the podium and undo everything Toastmasters and Dale Carnegie
ever taught.

Karama Has No Walls – Certainly has my vote for best
title, though I’m afraid that for Academy voters this one’s vibe is already
overshadowed by the Documentary Feature entry THE SQUARE. Both are ground-zero
reports of protests in Arab world against the military regimes, obviously shot
at great personal peril by the filmmakers. THE SQUARE covered a number of angry years
in the rebellion in Cairo, through a representative trio of Egyptian dissenters,
Muslim and non-Muslim. Karama Has No Walls, meanwhile, focuses on a lesser-known
“Arab Spring” uprising, in the nation of Yemen, hardly covered at all by the media. Filmmaker
Sara Ishaq attempts to crystallize the struggle by focuses on a single casualty
of one of the 53 civilians killed, a young Muslim shooting victim, interviewing
friends, family and witnesses. The all-Islamic POV is seldom seen around these
parts. But, as mentioned before, THE SQUARE tends to be more accessible for
Academy types.

The Lady in Number 6 - The documentary Oscars, short and
feature, have been accused (most notoriously by Spike Lee) of showing lopsided
favoritism to Holocaust-tinged subjects. Still, I expect the gold will go to
Malcolm Clarke’s Canadian production, just because the unique central figure is
a hard act to top. Alice Herz Sommer is an ever-upbeat 109-year-old Czech piano
virtuoso, serenading fellow block-dwellers and visitors in London with free
recitals. She discusses her long, eventful life, as a Prague youngster who knew
Kafka and Mahler, a young wife married in 1937 to a virtuoso violinist and an
eternal lover of music. Of course, she was a Jewish eyewitness to Nazi invasion
and a survivor of the Final Solution. While her husband and her mother both
perished in death chambers, Alice and her son were part of the notorious
“model” concentration camp at Terezin, where the piano concerts they performed
were enjoyed by German guards as well as fellow prisoners. Even now, after all
she endured, Alice professes (just as Anne Frank did in print) to believe that
people are basically good, and that music is miraculous – as well it should be,
being a main reason why she was allowed to live. Question is, if Alice wins an
Oscar, will she be arrested drag-racing in Miami, then have to face further
charges in Montreal for her entourage punching out a limo driver? The lady is
that cheerful.

Facing Fear – Jason Cohen’s narrative takes a rather
conventional approach, from the manipulative music soundtrack to the B-roll
footage of the neon-lit LA streets at night. But the storyline really pulls one
in when you realize where it’s going. There are dual narrators, one, Tim, a
now-reformed West Coast white supremacist who turned over a new leaf and now
preaches against his former neo-fascist ways (think Ed Norton in AMERICAN
HISTORY X). The other is Matthew, a homosexual once cast out by his family, who
was beaten up the selfsame skinhead punk Tim after a concert one Hollywood
night in the early 1980s and literally left for dead, to be a ghost nagging at
Tim’s increasingly troubled conscience. Once they unexpectedly re-encountered
each other, years later, the two onetime natural enemies formed an object
lesson in forgiveness and tolerance. You know, if these two men appeared at the
Gay Games later this year in Cleveland, I’d go. Aww, no I wouldn’t – they’re
both bigger than me, and would probably beat me up together, as a touching
display of unity and reconciliation.

Cave Digger – What’s this genre without a shaggy-artist
portrait?

Filmmaker Jeffrey Karoff here profiles New Mexico’s Ra
Paulette, a freestyle sculptor whose unique gimmick is that he painstakingly, and with
rudimentary hand tools, excavates holes in the ground and in hillsides to carve
out and finesse smooth-walled, amazingly decorated “transformative”
subterranean chambers for private clients (New Mexico is practically a
character itself; hard to imagine these sorts of people existing anyplace
else). For the slow, methodical pace of his work, Paulette is compared to
Michelangelo, and Karoff allegedly spent 13 years following Paulette’s projects
and ups and downs in his personal life. I couldn’t help but think from time to
time of one of the 2013’s deceased, the great documentarian Les Blank, who also
made such filmic portraits of nonconformist artist-eccentrics throughout his
career. If this one does win the gold, I do think Mr. Blank would approve.

That’s the long and the short of the Oscar-nominated
documentary shorts. As I said, I tend to thing THE LADY IN NUMBER 6 has the
Oscar sewn up, with the added bonus that filmmaker Clarke, a previous Oscar
nominee (yes, for Holocaust material) is a UK-born chap who is probably well
spoken in front of a microphone and therefore less prone to a meltdown. Then
again, I would have said the same about Jacqueline Bisset, so what do I know?
(3 out of 4 stars)

Additional review by Bob Ignizio

Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall - When
we meet Jack Hall, he is 82 years old and in his 21st year of a life
sentence for murder. A decorated World War II veteran who spent time
in a German POW camp, Jack says the man he killed was a drug dealer who sold to his son. He says this matter of factly, not as an excuse, but as an
explanation. Jack knows what he did was wrong, and there is never any
attempt by the film to justify what he has done. In true cinema
verite fashion, Prison
Terminal merely shows
us what occurs without commentary. Specifically, what we see are
Jack's final two weeks of life in a prison hospice program, and how
that program helps give him some measure of humanity and dignity.

Don't
worry, hardliners: your tax dollars aren't paying for this. The
program is funded entirely by donations and by inmates themselves,
and staffed by inmate volunteers. But without overtly raising the
question, the film seems to be asking: would it really be such a bad
thing if we did fund
programs like this? And perhaps more broadly, what purpose is really
being served by keeping someone like Jack behind bars until he dies?
4 out of 4 stars.

* NOTE * If
you can't catch PrisonTerminal
as part of the Oscar Nominated Shorts program at the Capitol, it will
premiere on HBO on March 31st.